Keeping your store and online customers happy means delivering great performance. This depends on a multitude of fine-tuned elements and functions covering every aspect of your business. Ensuring all these systems and processes talk to each other, is more important still.

I believe your challenge is not just about integrating online and offline channels. The key is real time inventory, but this requires your EPOS and retail management systems, warehouse applications, e-commerce systems, customer analytics, loyalty programmes and accounting  to be connected seamlessly.

Lulu Guinness, Burlington Arcade Store

The fall-back position is nearly always a time-consuming manual processes. This means you have less time to react and errors inevitably creep in. And, it can take the focus away from more important tasks and opportunities.

If you’ve got your eye on the larger competition and if your customer service is paramount, this can be a frustration, especially as few of you will have the luxury of internal specialist teams tasked with managing these issues. So training and supplier expertise become doubly crucial, especially as technological, organisational and process issues can all be involved.

Learn why British designer label Lulu Guinness needed connectivity to provide a cohesive single view of the business with live stock information and why integration is one of the key challenges for the business.

The implementation of Web services now provides robust integration between head office systems and the online business to provide real time stock information. A dynamic bi-directional link between systems, with live stock availability, replaces a cumbersome and time consuming flat file solution for previously updating stock items.

We developed web services that also link third party warehouse systems providing robust real-time links to head-office processes and to the Magento e-commerce system behind the website.  The customer experience, of course, is all the better because of it.

To find out more read the Lulu Guinness story and find out why MD Paul Spinks believes integration is so important and how the business in benefiting.

Futura provide EPOS and stock management solutions for lifestyle retailers, click here to find out more, or why not follow us for our latest updates on Twitter?